Today's date reminds me of days spent in the foggy mountain peaks, eating from convenience stores
and drinking from the everpresent vending machines that dotted the landscape like uh... vending machines.

After reading a few letters on people maxing out their characters and playing hours upon
hours to find every item. Just a little question/comment on that.

Wouldn't that take away from the storyline? I mean... with a game like Final Fantasy
Tactics, it would be easy to get lost in the huge plot or even forget the main jist
entirely. At the least, it would definitely make you distant. Maybe do these things
second time through?

"Ok I... I fought random battles for 10 straight hours of gameplay... now let's move on
with the plot... Err.. what as it I was suppose to do again? What was the last thing my
main character said?".

Or am I completely off base?

-----
Best Wishes,
Lyle J. A. Smith II

Googleshng:
Yes, if you stop in the middle of a game and max your characters out, odds are good that you're going
to totally forget what you were doing. This is why most people compelled to do this don't do it in the
middle of the game. They either do it right at the end, where all you have to remember is the location
of the final dungeon, or at the very begining. Of course, that can cost you some plot comprehension
too if it's a game where bosses shout stuff mid-battle.

The one that got away.

Well, the last email decided to send without anything. So here it is again.

A couple friends of mine have been raving about Legend of Mana, which came out back in 2000 for the PS. They're referring to it as Seiken Densetsu 3, but I think LoM is SD4. 3 was on the Super Famicon from what I recall, unless LoM happens to be the port of SD3. So my question is:

Is the Legend of Mana released in the US the third or fourth game in the Seiken Densetsu series?

--
Just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand.

Googleshng:
You're right on all points here. 1- SD1 in Japan, Final Fantasy Adventure here. 2- SD2 in Japan, Secret
of Mana here. 3- SD3 in Japan, a bunch of people whining here. 4- Legend of Mana in Japan, Legend of Mana
here.

SD3 for what it's worth was a lot like SoM, but without the groovy weapon experience system that made
it so cool, and with the ability to choose your 3 characters from several choices, then customize them
later in the game by picking between pairs of more good or more evil classes. It also had a day and night
system that affected several things, most notably the coolness of the werewolf character.

Completism

Dear Googleshng:

Actually, I enjoy gaining levels and abilities. In FFT, I would have Ramza yell which would give him JP and speed up the target. Then I would have my other characters gain JP by either casting status effects or even just throwing rocks at each other. And then I would upgrade every characters Bravery level to 95 (The spell which would temporarily up your Bravery would increase the stat permanently by one point each time it was cast.) and Faith up to the maximum level they could handle without deciding to run off and be hermits.

The purpose of the Bravery max is that the Samurai Reaction Handslap ability success rate was equal to your bravery rate. Realistically, you could quite easily have a party that as immune to all weapon attacks a few turns into the battle.

As for my ToS game, I enjoy the battles and am trying to max out all of the character's abilities. I do enjoy the story, but I am patient enough that I do not have to find out right away what is going to happen.

Anyway, more questions:

Surely there are other people out there that level up way too much and play games for extremely long times? I would like to think that I am not the only one.

Googleshng:
If you're going to do that sort of thing, FFT's a fun game to do it in. The random battles are actually a good deal harder than the plot ones if you're at decent levels, so things stay fairly interesting, and when you're ridiculously overpowered, you can afford to fiddle around with all those abilities that just plain look cool. Like teleport and ignore height.

Have you heard/played the WildTangent PC dungeon crawl titled 'Fate'? It is very deficient in the story department, but it is a really fun and well maintained game, (See playfate.com, there is a burgeoning mod commnity and the game's creator is very active on the forums...) Any chance that this game would be added to the Games section?

*snip*

-Herandar

Googleshng:
Well, I tend not to play PC games as a general rule, and as another general rule, I can't stand dungeon crawls. There's exceptions to both of these of course (read: Diablo 2 is pretty dang spiffy), but no, I haven't heard of this game here. At a glance, it looks nifty enough for what it is, but I doubt we'd add coverage for it since, last I checked, we have a policy against covering freeware/shareware games.

The #1 all time Q&A response!

I'm stuck I need the key from Alice and Wonderland and I can't fight in Olympus stadem because it needs repairs what should I do.

Googleshng:
Go find a walkthrough. The answer you'll find in one should solve your problems much better than I could. Particularly since at the moment, my copy of Kingdom Hearts is somewhere in a large storage container I don't have access to.

Patience is a Virtue

Sup Q&A Guru

got a question.

final fantasy III DS was it cancelled? or do you think it was cancelled?

Paine

Googleshng:
First off, it's not at all uncommon to see long lulls with no news whatsoever on games that are still in development, especially if they're for new pieces of hardware. Honestly, the games you hear about more than once a year before they're about to be released are the exceptions. The DS version of FF3 was only announced 9 months ago, so even if there hadn't been one single bit of information about it since, it'd be way too early to be wondering if it was cancelled.

More to the point though, a new little tidbit about this particular game was released just last week, so there's no way it could have been cancelled.

The Last Laugh:

No progress today, but I'm still hoping this is the last week I have to go roofless.